The Phantom Lover

by Ruby M. Ayres

He thought suddenly of June; June who, with all her bluntness, had a great heart and a deep understanding.

She would not want explanations; she would know why he had done it, and sympathise.

But June was obviously not the one concerned. It was not to June that he must confess.

The clock in his room struck twelve; too late to do anything to-night. The memory of Marie returned––Marie as she had looked when he found her in the drawing-room that night; as she had looked when he had left her in the little anteroom at the Hoopers’ and gone out with murder in his heart to find Ashton.

He stopped dead in his pacing.

“Oh, you cad––you cad!” he said with a groan.

Life was an intolerable, purposeless thing. He sat down at his desk and leaned his head in his hands. His whole life seemed to spell failure. With sudden impulse he seized a pen and began to write.

For the first few moments he hardly knew what he wrote. It was only when he reached the end of the first page that he seemed to realise with a start what he had done. He looked back at the written lines with something of a shock. There was no beginning to the letter, no date or address; it simply started off as if the pen had been guided by some influence outside himself, some desperate need.

“I don’t know what you will think when you get this letter. I am writing it because to-night I think I am half mad. I love you so much; there seems nothing in the whole world that counts any more now that I am beginning to understand that I can never have you. Esther, I ask you on my knees to listen to what I have to say. I have tried to keep away from you, to forget you; I’ve tried to put you out of my heart and persuade myself that I do not care––but it’s no use. I love you; I know you care something for me, but I shall love you always. To-night I have done an unpardonable thing for your sake. I explain things so badly. I can only hope that you will understand and try to make some excuse for me. Some one knows we were together in Paris––I need not tell you who. To-night, at a 289 house where I was, he had told several people that you and I had been to Paris together....”

Micky had gone on writing rapidly––he seemed to have lost himself in a sea of eloquence; his heart was pleading with the woman he loved through the poor medium of a sheet of unaddressed paper.